F Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of twentieth century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre, and her gradual descent into schizophrenia; the incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend. Fitzgerald was an individual who seemed to be composed of opposites and who, fittingly, could have been one of his own characters. He was charming, witty and in love with the magic and splendour of life, but also felt compelled to embrace the darkness. As a writer, his perception of the world around him was so finely tuned and acute that his life and career were a mirror of the 1920s and 30s, so that just as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, Fitzgerald's dazzling and youthful success yielded to drunkenness, despair and what he termed 'emotional bankruptcy'. This Pocket Essentials examines both Fitzgerald's life and writing and probes the infinitely complex and symbiotic relationship between the two, revealing the man behind the myth and behind some of the finest prose of all time.

Commonwealth of Letters complicates the traditional understanding of the relationship between elite, aging modernists like T.S. Eliot and the generation of colonial poets and novelists from Africa and the Caribbean- Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, and others-who rose to prominence after World War Two. Rather than a mostly one-sided relationship of exploitation, Kalliney emphasizes how both groups depended on-and thrived off-one another. The modernists, dispirited by the turn to a kind of bland, welfare-state realism in literature and the rise of commercial mass culture, sought rejuvenation and kindred spirits amongst a group of emigre writers from the Caribbean and Africa who had been educated in the literary curriculum exported to the colonies in the years before 1945. For their part, the postcolonial writers, ambitious for literary success and already skeptical of the trend toward corruption and philistinism among their compatriot anticolonial politicians, sought the access to cultural capital and the comforting embrace of literature provided by metropolitan modernists. As a result, modernist networks became defined by the exchange between metropolitan and colonial writers. In several chapters, Kalliney provides compelling analyses of colonial writers in postwar cultural institutions, such as the BBC, literary anthologies, and high profile English publishers such as Faber & Faber and Heinemann, developer of the African Writers Series. Throughout, Kalliney acknowledges the elements of cultural imperialism, and paternalism involved in these relationships; however, he broadens our perspective on postcolonial writers by emphasizing the strategic ways they manipulated these elite modernist networks to advance their own cultural agendas.Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

This collection of essays by a diverse group of young academics, established critics, and well-known writers strikes an intriguing balance between scholarship and reminiscence. The only full-length book on Mary McCarthy that is not a biography, this volume contains discussions of McCarthy as a member of the New York intelligentsia, her search for a just and ethical political philosophy, and the paradox of her views on feminism. The contributors include McCarthy biographers Carol Brightman, Carol Gelderman, and Fran Kiernan; novelists Thomas Flanagan, Maureen Howard, and Thomas Mallon; Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Frances Fitzgerald; and critics Morris Dickstein and Katie Roiphe. The book concludes with a moving reminiscence by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, 'York Notes Advanced' introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Literature after Postmodernism explores the use of literary fantastic storylines in contemporary novels which begin to think beyond postmodernism. They develop an aesthetic perspective that aims at creation and communication instead of subversion and can thus be considered no longer deconstructive but reconstructive.

The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

Flannery O'Connor once noted, ""The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."" Her railroading metaphor wittily captures much of the respect and unease Faulkner's example brought the worldwide community of authors. Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. Prominent literary scholar M. Thomas Inge documents the scope of his influence in the twentieth century through the words of those writers themselves. This collection of essays offers a survey attempting to capture exactly what Faulkner meant to his literary peers and colleagues both in the United States and abroad. Inge has combed essays, articles, reviews, letters, and comments written by over forty novelists, poets, and playwrights about Faulkner's fiction and the power of his literary accomplishment. Many major American writers sound off here, as well as important figures from France, England, Japan, and South America. Some speak about his technical virtuosity and how this expertise has directly influenced them, and others express the difficulties of trying to escape his example. A few even criticize him for what they see as artistic failures. The variety of responses demonstrate, in any case, that Faulkner created an unavoidable power in his own time and remains a permanent force in literature.

Called the King of the Pulps, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand, wrote nearly 400 Westerns from The Untamed to Destry Rides Again-a total of more than 220 books in this genre. Yet Max Brand also created Dr. Kildare (of books, films, and television) and wrote under twenty-one pseudonyms, in another dozen genres. This book removes the mask, with deeply personal memoirs from family, friends and fellow writers, taking us through his orphaned boyhood on the brutal ranches of California, his frustrating decades in Italy, as both a classical poet and a fast-action pulpist, to his heroic death as a war correspondent on the World War II battlefields. Faust's life story is augmented by a complete bibliography of his work-over a thousand books, stories, and films-plus the first listing of works about Faust.

This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield's themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader - via close textual analysis - to an understanding of the author's modernist techniques.

In Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches award-winning creative artists and scholars explore the power and complexity of stories in a variety of genres and cultures. Storytelling is of crucial importance to narratives of post-coloniality, gender, history, social status and nationhood. This collection of analytical and reflective pieces demonstrates the fundamental role played by imagination in the production and contestation of culture. The writers show how personal and public truths are manufactured, modified and undone through processes of narrativization and storytelling.

Almost three hundred years after his birth in 1694, this is the first comprehensive study of Voltaire's contes philosophiques - the philosophical tales for which he is now best remembered and which include the masterpiece Candide. The Fables of Reason situates each of the twenty-six stories in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings and approaches in the light of modern critical thinking. It rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, written merely in the margins of his historiography and his campaigns against the Establishment. Arguing that narrative is Voltaire's essential mode of thought, the book stresses the role of the reader and shows how the contes are designed less to communicate a set of truths than to encourage independence of mind. Roger Pearson has written a witty, lucid and scholarly guide to the `fables of reason' with which Voltaire undermined - and continues to undermine - the religious, philosophical, and economic `fables', by which other thinkers have tried to explain and direct human experience.

William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley asserts that although recent scholarship presents a narrative that counters optimistic frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells of intra-ethnic violence, involving marriages and families. He examines historiography and writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others.

As the greatest satirist in the English language, Jonathan Swift was both admired and feared in his own time for the power of his writing, and hugely influential on writers who followed him. Swift transformed models such as utopian writing, political pamphleteering, and social critique with his dark and uncompromising vision of the human condition, deepening the outlook of contemporaries such as Alexander Pope, and leaving a legacy of Swiftian satire in the work of Hogarth, Fielding, Austen and Beckett, among others. This collection of essays, with its distinguished list of international contributors, centres on Swift, the genres and authors who influenced him, and his impact on satire and satirists from his own time to the twentieth century.

Lawrence's genius is unquestioned, but he is seldom considered a writer interested in comedy. This 1996 collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the range, scope and sheer verve of Lawrence's comic writing. Comedy for Lawrence was not, as his contemporary Freud insisted, a mere defence mechanism. The comic mode enabled him to function parodically to undermine radically those forms of authority from which he always felt estranged. Lawrence's critique of the modern failure of the mystic impulse is present in all the comic moments in his writing where it is used to create an alternative cultural and social space. Lawrence used humour to distance himself from the dominant orthodoxy surrounding him, from the material of his fiction, from his readers, and, finally, from his own often intensely serious preoccupations. This book revises the popular image of Lawrence as a humourless writer and reveals his strategic use of a genuine comic talent.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

This title offers a new critical approach to E.M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers. This is a unique and fresh addition to the changing field of postcolonial studies and offers new insight into the controversial relationship between colonial and postcolonial writing.

Navigate the fascinating world of mainstream fiction! With emphasis on award-winning fiction, this companion guide to Now Read This: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction, 1978-1998, features more than 500 novels published between 1990 and 2001. Using the same easy-access organization that made the original so popular, this book includes more than 400 new entries and several features that enable you to discover new reads and read-alikes based on an appeal-characteristics approach to the literature. Never again shy of an answer to "Can you recommend a good book?" you will find this to be an indispensable resource and tool.

Best-known for the cruel moral vision of such novels as "Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire, Close Quarters, ""and Fire Down Below," William Golding expressed a view of humanity that was essentially religious, torn between the brutal realities of good and evil. A Nobel Laureate, he also won the Booker Prize for "Rites of Passage." Distinguished critic Virginia Tiger argues that his writings explore themes of human destiny and vision. Drawing upon her own personal recollections of conversations with Golding and quoting from her correspondence with him, she shows how structure supports content in this extraordinary body of work. The only book to offer a complete commentary on his entire literary oeuvre.

Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story is a lively series of case studies celebrating the close relationship between detective fiction and the ghost story. It features many of the most famous authors from both genres including Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, M. R. James and Tony Hillerman.

Sixty years after its first publication, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio continues to stand as a 'classic' of modernist American fiction. In original new essays by David H. Stouck, Marcia Jacobson, Clare E. Colquitt, and Thomas Yingling, Winesburg is reconsidered in the contexts of the expressionist movement, the American boy-book tradition, the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the rise of industrial capitalism. An introduction by John W. Crowley reviews the career of Sherwood Anderson and his assimilation into the literary canon.

Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in Darkness engages Twain's best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as his lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the allegorical tale "A Fable of the Yellow Terror" and the yellow face play Ah Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the Law of Historical Memory. The chapters focus on cultural products that interrogate the processes and pitfalls of traumatic remembrance. Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television shows, and comics, the volume examines a substantial body of works in which there is a focus on overcoming the notion that Spanish history is pathological.

This book is a re-examination of the fertile years of early modernism immediately preceding the First World War. During this period, how, where, and under whose terms the avant-garde in Britain would be constructed and consumed were very much to play for. It is the first study to look in detail at two little magazines marginalised from many accounts of this competitive process: Rhythm and the Blue Review. By thoroughly examining not only the content but the interrelated networks that defined and surrounded these publications, Faith Binckes aims to provide a fresh and challenging perspective to the on-going reappraisal of modernism. Founded in 1911, and edited by John Middleton Murry with assistance from Michael Sadleir and subsequently from Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and The Blue Review featured a series of pivotal moments. Rhythm was the arena for a challenge to Roger Fry's vision of Post-Impressionism, for the introduction of Picasso to a British audience, for early short stories and reviews by Lawrence, and for Mansfield's discovery of a voice in which to frame her breakthrough writing on New Zealand. A further context for many of these experiments was the extended and acrimonious debate Rhythm conducted with A.R. Orage's New Age, in which issues of the proper gender, generation, and formulation of modernity were debated month by month. However, reading magazines as vehicles for avant-garde development can only provide half the story. The book also pays close attention to their dialogic, reproductive, and periodical nature, and explores the strategies at work within the terminology of the new. Crucially, it argues that they offer compelling material evidence for the consistently mobile and multiple boundaries of the modern, and puts forward a compelling case for focusing upon the specificity of magazines as a medium for literary and artistic innovation.